Need Sleep? A Milton Academy Sleep Phenomenon Explored
Taylor Jacobson, Class I
Reprinted from the Milton Measure

Over the years many writers have tried to describe and analyze the sleep deprivation problem at Milton Academy. But description and analysis is not what we need: We already know that we’re exhausted when we wake up and when we go to bed, and that we often fall asleep in class, and that eight hours of sleep are recommended. At these points we often laugh, almost as a matter of pride, that we the students (and faculty) of Milton Academy are hard working and over-committed and yet we get it all done. We scoff at eight hours of sleep and enjoy being able to pity ourselves and commiserate with each other when we stay up until 3 am studying for a test, writing a paper, or writing grades and comments, as many teachers and students did last week. What we don’t realize is that the sleep deprivation is hurting us more than we give it credit for.

First, establish whether or not you are sleep deprived by taking this Yes or No test:
1. Are you tired during the day?
2. Have you fallen asleep during the day?
3. Do you have trouble getting up in the morning?
4. Do you sleep late on weekends?
A good sign that you are sleep deprived is that you thought these questions were ridiculous and that you don’t know anyone that would answer No to any of them. Nevertheless, Yes answers indicate a sizeable sleep debt, or the amount of hours of sleep loss a person has built up. People that have no sleep debt would rarely be tired during the day, would get up in the morning unprompted after their needed hours of sleep (about 8 for adults, 8 1/2 –91/2 for teens), and would never encounter the sleeping-in phenomenon on weekends because they would have no sleep debt to pay back.

Because just about the whole United States has sleep debt by these standards, it’s pretty much futile to try to tell everyone to get more sleep. The fact that our economy is capitalistic means that all the ambitious companies and people out there will extend their work hours, and therefore all the rest of the companies have to in order to compete. In addition, given that most people want to have social and family lives on top of their work lives, one can easily see why the average American is sleep deprived.

Assuming that you’ve accepted the existence of your sleep debt, you still should know a few things about sleep debt before you decide to pull your next all-nighter. By cheating ourselves of sleep, we diminish the quality of our wakefulness. This is less obvious during the middle of the day and in the late afternoon because stimulants such as class discussion, tests that demand our attention, and participation in sports can easily mask our tiredness. The effects of sleep deprival become especially obvious in first period class and during last period class. Early morning drowsiness is caused by our bodies wanting not just the needed eight hours, but also a few more to burn off some sleep debt. During last period, when most students feel like taking a nap, is usually around the lowest waking point in our biorhythm, so while a rested person would be likely to have less energy at this time, sleep-deprived people will just want to sleep. Most students have come to accept sleepiness at these times because it’s the norm, but this tiredness is actually just our sleep debt talking, making us less perceptive and alert during tests, and slower to react in sports games.

Although stimulants can help us mask our sleepiness, once we reach a certain point nothing can keep us awake. Students who drive to school early in the morning, and often return home after a hard, tiring day, are actually subjecting themselves to a high risk. Because driving is such an automatic activity, drivers have little to keep them awake. Although opening a window and blasting the radio seem like good ways to stay awake, drivers are still sitting in a sedentary position and moving very little, especially on the highway where driving can be mesmerizing and monotonous. Sleep doctor William Dement says of driving, “drowsiness is the last stage before sleep.” That means any time a driver feels drowsy, sleep could come at any moment. Even when drivers are successful at staying awake, as soon as they get close to their destination, they relax and don’t concentrate for that last mile or so, which is why most accidents occur close to home.
This “relaxing phenomenon” has further reaching effects. It is why, on weekends and vacations, we find ourselves sleepier, less productive, and less able to ward off illness. The stress of school or the workplace, while very unhealthy, can actually prevent us from getting sick, until we let down our guard during time off. Additionally, because we stay up late on weekends and sleep even later to make up for it, we are actually giving ourselves the same effects of jet lag. We then have to recover during the ensuing days, putting us all in a torturous, illness-prone cycle. Because people are often so incredulous when they learn that sleep debt has so many harmful effects, take a look at what happens when people have zero sleep debt.

Several experiments on sleep have found that if people are put in a sleep-friendly with no outside stimulants, they take about a week to sleep off all of their sleep debt, sleeping between 25 and 30 extra hours on top of the nightly eight. Once they have no sleep debt, they settle into a regular schedule where they sleep for a constant number of hours per night, an average of about 8 hours, and get up unprompted when this period is over. Once they wake up they have great difficulty going back to sleep, and stay awake for the whole day. One such experiment involved volunteer navy personnel being enclosed alone inside a silent, dark cubicle 24 hours a day for a week, with no room to move around. With no better way to pass the time than sleeping, over the course of that week the subjects’ amounts of sleep decreased daily, from about 16 hours a day to 8 hours. This finding is very striking because it shows that even in a completely quiet environment with no stimulants, people with no sleep debt could only sleep for 8 hours.
While the structure of American society demands that the average person be sleep deprived, choices we make on a daily basis determine just how much sleep debt we have. Most students are lazy during their free period, opting to save most of their work for later that night, but what they don’t realize is that they are lazy because they are sleep deprived. Getting adequate sleep at night could actually give you the energy to get work done during the day, but such a dramatic change in lifestyle hardly seems possible. Nevertheless, maybe the knowledge that your procrastination is costing a more than you thought might help break the wicked, sleep-deprived cycle and create a smarter, faster, healthier and happier you.

Dement, William C. The Promise of Sleep. Delacorte Press, New York. 1999.